Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (3 page)

Public officials, journalists, and prominent clergy in the twin capitals of Anglo-America, New York and London, constructed a transatlantic narrative of Irish degeneracy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a narrative arguing that Irish poverty, intemperance, and corruption made them unworthy of charity and unable to rule themselves. Trevelyan’s complaints about the “moral evil” of starving Irishmen were echoed in the moralizing of well-meaning Protestant aid organizations in New York, where the poor who applied for aid were subjected to investigation to determine whether they were morally fit.

Critics who saw a continuity of character in the transatlantic Irish experience were not wrong, even if their conclusions were wrongheaded. The attitudes, cultural narratives, and values that informed Tammany’s Irish-American politicians and voters can be traced not just to tenements of the Lower East Side but also to the villages of rural Ireland that were home to the bulk of the island’s Catholic population and that sent hundreds of thousands of emigrants across the water to New York City. While most of Tammany Hall’s district leaders, petty officeholders, and elected officials never set foot in Ireland, it would seem clear that for Tammany’s voters the New York experience was only half the story. They or their ancestors brought with them from Ireland a political and cultural framework that helped them interpret power in New York.
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This assertion sounds obvious enough, although it has been ignored in endless histories of Tammany Hall. And yet scholars of the African diaspora in the United States have shown how African cultural forms—from the ring shout to the social importance of mothers to ethnic and linguistic differences—influenced the speech, religious rituals, kinship circles, and cultural memories of enslaved African-Americans.
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In similar fashion, then, the Irish who dominated Tammany Hall cannot be seen simply as generic white European immigrants. There were important particulars to the Irish emigrant experience, particularly after the potato famine, that informed their analysis of power and privilege and influenced national politics in the early twentieth century through Tammany Hall. The Tammany Irish certainly saw in their antagonists in the New York reform movement a continuation of the prejudice and intolerance inflicted on their ancestors in Ireland.

Even the achievement of prosperity and power in New York could not flick away the chip on many an Irish-American shoulder. In 1898, a prominent New York Irish businessman named John Byrne saw in a friend’s failure to win a top judicial appointment the same sinister forces that, in his view, prevented Irish Catholics from attaining office and success in Ireland. Byrne complained to Tammany Congressman William Bourke Cockran, an affluent Irish Catholic, that his friend had been brought down by the same “iron heel of tyranny . . . from which our ancestors suffered enough.”
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“Our Celtic fellow citizens are about as remote from us in temperament and constitution as the Chinese,” wrote the New York diarist and lawyer George Templeton Strong. Different, indeed, were the rural Catholic Irish who descended on New York’s streets in the mid-nineteenth century. They were different not simply because they confessed their sins to a priest. They were different because they were Irish, not Anglo-Saxon, at a time when that surely was a difference with a good deal of distinction. They were a poor, starving, rural people with few skills, and they had been subjects of an oppressive colonial system that some of them had routinely challenged through extralegal means.
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“Their means of resistance—conspiracy, pretense, foot-dragging, and obfuscation—were the only ones ordinarily available to them, ‘weapons of the weak,’ like those employed by defeated and colonized peoples everywhere,” wrote historian Robert James Scally in his masterful re-creation of Irish townland life. In Tammany Hall, the Irish found a vehicle for expressing their resistance and their grievances, a weapon to wield against those who wished to disenfranchise them or deny them jobs on the public payroll, and, at times, a conspiracy designed to counter the power of privilege exercised in quiet private clubs.
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Power, then, was an end worthy of justifying the means to attain it. But under Irish-American rule, Tammany Hall became more than just a center of power and patronage. At the height of its influence, Tammany Hall supported the writing of a new social contract in New York, one that served as a model for a more aggressive role for government in twentieth-century American society.

Tammany’s Irish leaders, flawed though so many were, helped create modern government and urban politics. They did so not simply by arranging for jobs, although jobs were needed, not simply by fixing elections, although the ballot was not sacrosanct, and not simply by appealing to voters’ worst instincts, although theatric demagoguery was a Tammany staple. They created a new politics by embracing the pluralism of the neighborhoods in which they lived, and by burying, once and for all, the transatlantic Anglo-American idea of how government ought to run.

ONE

“TAMMANY HALL BELONGS TO US”

A
s they made their way through the darkening city streets on a late April evening in 1817, members of a private political organization known as Tammany Hall were thinking not of the glories of a New York spring but of an election battle just days away. A man they despised, DeWitt Clinton, was on the verge of winning a special election for New York governor—and, as governor, Clinton surely would be happy to return Tammany’s disdain with special enthusiasm, since Tammany had ousted him as the city’s mayor in 1815. Tammany was prepared to distribute ballots to voters listing one of their own, Peter Porter, as the only opposition to Clinton, but they very likely knew they had little chance of success.
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The Tammany men saw themselves as the proud keepers of true republicanism, men who were very different from the economic elites who traded in paper or profited from the labor of others. Tammany was aligned with the Democratic-Republican Party, the party of Thomas Jefferson, the party of the skilled tradesman. Clinton also was a Democrat-Republican, but the purists at Tammany considered him too aristocratic, too arbitrary, too high and mighty. He reminded them of the Federalists who were on their way to extinction, a party of bankers and merchants who worshipped at the altar of Alexander Hamilton, dead these thirteen years, shot in a duel with Vice President Aaron Burr, the man who helped turn Tammany into a political power. Burr was not a member of the organization, but he recognized its potential as a source of votes and support as he planned his own rise to power in New York at the turn of the nineteenth century.

As they neared their headquarters at the intersection of Nassau and Frankfort Streets, just a short walk from the East River, the Tammany men had another bit of business to discuss privately before their meeting got underway. They were under pressure from the city’s growing Irish population to nominate an immigrant from County Cork, Thomas Addis Emmet, for State Assembly. Emmet would have seemed a natural—he was a loyal Democrat-Republican, a true believer in Jeffersonian democracy, and he had served as state attorney general for several months before the Federalists grabbed power in 1813 and kicked him out of office, because that’s how politics worked.

But Emmet wouldn’t do. He was a Clinton man, and so were most of his fellow Irishmen. Clinton had been good to the Irish. Many of the city’s Irish were Catholics—although Emmet was not—and until Clinton intervened on their behalf, Catholics were effectively barred from holding public office in New York thanks to a “test oath” required of all civil authorities. Commonly used throughout the transatlantic Anglo-Protestant world, test oaths were constructed to offend Catholic sensibilities and thus prevent them from holding even minor office. In Ireland, the island’s majority population was kept powerless because officeholders were required to swear their belief that the Catholic Mass and the veneration of “the Blessed Virgin Mary and other saints” was “impious and idolatrous.” In New York, the test oath included language that essentially required Catholics to renounce their allegiance to the pope. Clinton, a Protestant like Emmet, heard the protests of Catholics and in 1806 helped win abolition of the oath during the first of his three terms as mayor. The Irish repaid him with their votes.
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Emmet’s friendship with Clinton would have been enough to keep him off Tammany’s ticket. But even if he broke with Clinton, he couldn’t possibly resolve another issue—he was an immigrant, and Tammany Hall did not look kindly on those born in the Old World. Tammany Hall was about Americanism, about the New World, about the rejection of Europe with all its privilege and pomp. Only a native-born American could serve as an officer of Tammany Hall.

Ironically, the immigrant Emmet was as fervent a republican as any Tammany man. He sought to throw off British rule and establish a republic in Ireland in the late 1790s, but he was arrested and imprisoned for several years before his release and exile to New York. His equally rebellious younger brother, Robert, suffered a far worse fate. Arrested after leading a botched republican revolution in Dublin in 1801, Robert Emmet was convicted of treason and hanged. Such was the fate of so many of Ireland’s rebels—dreamers they were, fighting against the massed power of the state, and dying young.

Thomas Addis Emmet was a hero for many in the city’s Irish population of about ten thousand, and, coincidentally, he was one of the city’s most prominent attorneys. He established his own law practice in 1805, and it soon became one of the city’s most respected firms. A century after Emmet’s death, an out-of-work politician named Franklin Delano Roosevelt became a partner in the firm, which was renamed Emmet, Marvin and Roosevelt. When FDR found himself gainfully employed in the White House some years later, he hired Emmet’s great-great-grandson, famed playwright Robert Emmet Sherwood, as a presidential speechwriter.

Tammany saw Emmet not as an attractive personality and potential vote-getter but as an annoyance. The Irish could protest all they wanted, but his name certainly would not appear on the organization’s ballot, no more than DeWitt Clinton’s would. That much was clear as the Tammany men filed into their meeting room, where they were treated to a shocking sight.

The Irish got inside the hall first—some two hundred of them, many from the Irishtown district near St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church on Barclay Street. They sat in places reserved for Tammany members, and they had no plans to move until Tammany agreed to nominate Thomas Addis Emmet for the State Assembly. At their head were two other Irish political exiles, a physician named William James MacNeven, a native of County Galway, and William Sampson, a lawyer from County Derry. Like Emmet, both men had risked their lives and liberty by seeking for Ireland what the Americans and the French had won for themselves—a republic. They were not about to retreat in the presence of Tammany Hall’s legions.

So all hell broke loose in Tammany Hall. MacNeven attempted to give a speech but was shouted down when a Tammany man yelled, “Go home”—presumably back to Galway. Another Irishman proclaimed: “There is a party who have refused to place any Irishman on the ticket. That party must be opposed.” Opposed it was, with fists and furniture. An eyewitness to the melee was inspired to flights of sarcastic poetry in the
New York Evening Post
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At length, O hard to tell! The natives yield,

The stubborn Irish keep the dear-bought field.

O! for a Homer’s muse, who could rehearse

The politicians’ gallant deeds in verse.

Homer’s muse never did show up, but the mayor did, and the Irish discreetly withdrew while Tammany’s wounded were looked after.
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By then, the Irish had made their point. They had left behind a country where they were routinely denied access to power. They were not about to let that happen again.

Several days later, DeWitt Clinton, champion of New York’s Irish, overwhelmingly defeated Tammany’s man in the governor’s race.

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The organization known officially as the Society of St. Tammany or Columbian Order, founded in New York City in 1788, took its name from a chief of the Lenni-Lenape tribe, Tamanend, who, legend had it, greeted William Penn when he landed in the New World in 1682. Tamanend, or Tammany, was credited with the peaceful interaction between natives and newcomers in the colony of Pennsylvania. The chief died before the turn of the eighteenth century, but he lived on in place names (there is a parish called St. Tammany in Louisiana), public memory (the colonies of Pennsylvania and Maryland celebrated a holiday in his honor), and in the consciousness of the members of New York’s Tammany Society. The chief’s ascension to the communion of saints was declared not by a clerical authority but by popular acclamation. American colonists saw him as an idealized, indeed saintly, representation of the continent’s native population. Writing about the cult of Tamanend in Philadelphia, John Adams told his wife, Abigail, “The people here have sainted him and keep his day.”
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